Let me begin by explaining the title of my paper. The term "secondary
orality" was coined by Walter J. Ong in the early 1970s.1
It refers to the new, electronically mediated culture of spoken, as contrasted
with written, language. Secondary orality is post-literal in the sense
of being different from, but also rooted in, grafted upon, literacy. Thus
secondary orality is certainly not identical with the orality of preliteral
cultures - with primary orality, as Ong calls it. While the orality of
preliterate cultures serves as the sole medium of collective consciousness
and memory - think, for instance, of Homer - secondary orality has recourse
to writing, book printing, and the electronic recording of texts and data.
However, from a semantic point of view, secondary orality does in
important ways parallel primary orality. The meaning of utterances is in
both cases intrinsically bound up with the extra-linguistic situations
in which those utterances occur. Or rather there is no sharp dividing line
between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic: Names have a fundamental
function, but they belong together with, and do not merely designate, their
bearers; and an utterance is not a complex of names, but a dynamic act
in itself, a deed. By contrast, written language consists of separate words,
each of which has a literal meaning, designates a definite concept
or object. Context does play a role, but only as a guide to recognizing
the proper designation. The meaning of a written text is open to interpretation,
but does not alter with changing circumstances. As the metaphor has it:
Spoken language is alive, written texts are dead.

The thesis I will here put forward is that the genesis and the direction
of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is not independent of the emergence
of secondary orality. The thesis as such is not new. I first propounded
it in my essay "Wittgenstein and the Problem of Machine Consciousness"2.
And Toulmin in his Cosmopolis, in the section "The Return to the
Oral", pointed out that the later Wittgenstein "was moving away from the
expression of beliefs in written propositions to their transient, contextual
expression in language games, speech acts, and utterances generally".3
Now in order to render this thesis plausible - to show how natural
it is to view Wittgenstein's later philosophy from the perspective of the
orality/literacy chasm - I shall introduce my main argument via a three-stage
detour. In the third stage of that detour I will draw attention to the
importance Plato had for Wittgenstein in the early 1930s; in the
second, I will briefly refer to Havelock's interpretation of Plato as the
philosopher, of literacy triumphant, in Greece - a paradoxical and contested
interpretation; and in order to prepare us for that paradoxical interpretation
I will begin, in the first stage, by recalling some lecture notes made
by José Ortega y Gasset made for a seminar he was to hold on Plato
in 1946 - notes in which the orality/literacy distinction plays the central
role.4

Ortega here points out that "if linguists understand by speech [hablar]
the use of a language [usar de una lengua], they commit a radical error.
Language [lengua] is not actually an effective usage [lenguaje], i.e. speech
[habla], if it is not complemented by the modulations of voice, by facial
expression, by gestures, and by the entire physical attitude of the person.
Therefore the language [lengua] of the linguist is only a fragment of linguistic
usage [lenguaje] in the sense of speech [habla]."5 Linguists
have come to hold a misleading view of language, Ortega continues, because
grammar is a theory that had been in fact developed as an answer to the
then new technique, namely writing.6 However, written,
or indeed printed, language is merely "petrified" speech [decir]; speech
is authentic only if it arises out of a situation to which it is a reaction;
speech is, at its most fundamental, dialogue or conversation. The effective
unit of speech is the sentence in context; words in isolation do not have
meanings.7 We have, Ortega concludes, grown imperceptive
through the habit of reading that has become second nature with us, we
profit from the advantages of the written word [palabra escrita] and feel
an increasing disdain for the only language that deserves to be called
so, namely oral speech [palabra oral] - a disdain for the wonders
of the dialogue and of oratory.8And
what a paradox, adds Ortega, that it was precisely Plato - with his famous
tirades against writing - who became the first writer of books in Greece.9

Now what Eric Havelock has shown in his monograph Preface to Plato,
published in 1963,10 is that writing was, for Plato,
not just a new medium in which to express his philosophy; on the contrary,
writing, the experience of literacy, formed the very source of Platonism.
When Plato inquired about the nature of justice, or the beautiful, or goodness,
he was not merely asking new questions; he was asking questions with regard
to abstract terms that were simply not there in the Greek language prior
to the rise of literacy. It is the syntax of writing that creates abstract
terms; and it is the impression given by written language that all words
signify basically in the same manner, namely by designating something.
That something, when it came to abstract terms, had to be an abstract object:
thus were born Platonic ideas.

It is known that Wittgenstein enjoyed reading Plato; but the significance
Plato had for him is quite underrated, and has never been properly understood.
In the year 1931 - i.e. during a crucial period in the development of his
later philosophy - Wittgenstein refers, in his notebooks, at least eleven
times to Plato, quoting a number of passages, even quite long ones. Plato
certainly plays a role in those notebooks no other philosopher ever played.
The passages Wittgenstein again and again quotes belong to those where
Plato's path from a specific view of meaning to a specific ontology becomes
particularly clear. Wittgenstein obviously had a feeling that the point
in the history of philosophy to which he wanted to return is the one at
which Plato had taken the wrong turning. As he said to Schlick in 1931:
"I cannot characterize my standpoint better than by saying that it is opposed
to that which Socrates represents in the Platonic dialogues."11
In fact it is quite striking how some of the central passages in Wittgenstein
parallel, and run counter to, some of the central passages in Plato. Here
is one from the Euthyphro, and one from the Philosophical Investigations.
"[M]y friend, you did not give me sufficient information before, when I
asked what holiness was, but you told me that this was holy which you are
now doing, prosecuting your father for murder. - Euthyphro: Well, what
I said was true, Socrates. - Socrates: Perhaps. But, Euthyphro, you say
that many other things are holy, do you not? - Euthyphro: Why, so they
are. - Socrates: Now call to mind that this is not what I asked you, to
tell me one or two of the many holy acts, but to tell the essential aspect,
by which all holy acts are holy..."12 - "You talk about
all sorts of language games, but have nowhere said what the essence of
a language game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these
activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. - And
this is true. - Instead of producing something common to all that we call
language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common
which makes us use the same word for all, - but that they are related to
one another in many different ways."13

If Wittgenstein's opposition to Plato was motivated, to some measure
at least, by the emergence of post-literacy, he was certainly not aware
of this. In fact he did not clearly perceive the radical epistemological
differences between written and spoken language. Two authors who could
have influenced him here, but, judging by the way Wittgenstein's arguments
will proceed, clearly did not do so, were Oswald Spengler and Bronislaw
Malinowski. In Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes - a book which,
as is well-known, Wittgenstein read - he could have found the idea that
writing is, as Spengler had put it, a quite new type of language, implying
"a complete change in the relations of man's waking consciousness", liberating
the mind "from the tyranny of the present"; so while speaking and
hearing take place only in proximity and in the present, writing bridges
distance both in space and in time.14 Malinowski's essay
"The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" appeared as an appendix
to the Ogden and Richards volume The Meaning of Meaning.15
Wittgenstein of course must have had some acquaintance with this volume
- he does, occasionally, refer to the views of Ogden and Richards on meaning
- but he nowhere mentions Malinowski. In the latter's essay "primitive
living tongue, existing only in actual utterance" is contrasted with "dead,
inscribed languages". The former, Malinowski stresses, is "to be regarded
as a mode of action, rather than as a countersign of thought".16
In a primitive language, he writes, "the meaning of any single word is
to a very high degree dependent on its context"; indeed it is dependent,
as he puts it, on the context of situation - i.e., on the extra-linguistic
environment. Written documents, by contrast, are "naturally isolated",
the statements contained in them "are set down with the purpose of being
self-contained and self-explanatory".17 Spoken linguistic
material "lives only in winged words, passing from man to man", word-meanings
being "inextricably mixed up with, and dependent upon, the course of the
activity in which the utterances are embedded".18 Language
in a preliterate culture, Malinowski emphasizes, is never "a mere mirror
of reflected thought". In writing however "language becomes a condensed
piece of reflection", the reader "reasons, reflects, remembers, imagines".19
And it is significant that in Malinowski's estimate such reflection is
a latephilosophically dangerous enterprise, leading to a "misuse of words",
bestowing "real existence" upon meanings - giving rise, that is, to Plato's
ideas and to medieval realism.20

My suggestion is that although Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy,
came to represent views we might regard as post-literal ones, he did not
receive them from Spengler, Malinowski, or any possible similar source.
Rather, he acquired these views through being directly influenced by phenomena
of a secondarily oral type. To such influences Wittgenstein must have been
particularly susceptible. Although he was an obsessive writer, Wittgenstein
had a problematic relation to written language, especially to written language
in its fully developed form: the printed book. Already in the preface to
his Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, compiled in the early
1920s in the course of his activity as an elementary school teacher in
Lower Austria, Wittgenstein had complained about the distorting effects
of typography; and his reluctance to publish his writings is of
course notorious. Here also come to mind his poor orthography; his anachronistic
predilection for having people read out loud texts to him; the common observation
that his favourite readings he really knew by heart; the aphorism and the
dialogue as conspicuous stylistic features of his writing; and even his
tendency to explain arguments by using pictures and diagrams.21

A post-literal phenomenon clearly having specific impact on Wittgenstein
was the film, both in its silent and in its "talkie" versions -
to apply here the terminology of the late twenties.22
Going to the movies was almost an addiction with Wittgenstein; and it is
striking that he regularly used the film metaphor to illustrate philosophical
points, in particular points where the relation of the signified to signs
belonging to more than one media was at issue. Thus in a conversation
with Schlick and others in Vienna in December 1929: "Nicht der Tonstreifen
begleitet den Film, sondern die Musik. Der Tonstreifen begleitet
den Bildstreifen. ... Die Musik begleitet den Film ... Die Sprache begleitet
die Welt."23 In England the first "talkie" films were
shown in 1928, in Vienna towards the end of 1929. Wittgenstein must have
been exposed to new experiences of language through watching them, as also,
earlier, through watching silent films. One is not left without possible
conjectures as to the nature of those new experiences. Béla Balázs,
in his book Der sichtbare Mensch, published in Vienna in 1924 -
a book that soon became very influential - reflecting on the silent film
makes the following observation: "In the film ... speaking is a play of
facial gestures and immediately visual facial expression. They who see
speaking, will learn things very different from what is learned by those
who hear the words."24 Balázs, a playwright and
critic, belonged to the circle of Georg Lukács, and to the circle
of Robert Musil (one should be aware that there was more than one "Vienna
circle"). Balázs published a second book on the film, this time
on the sound film, as early as 1930, again addressing the issue of how
language here comes to be seen in a new perspective.

Now even though coming to articulate linguistic intuitions characteristic
of post-literacy, and developing arguments and notions which today serve
as important instruments for dealing with philosophical problems pertaining
to secondary orality, Wittgenstein, as I have already suggested, was not
aware of the true nature of his enterprise. Not only did he never arrive
at a text he was satisfied with; but his method of re-ordering, again and
again, the passages in his manuscripts and typoscripts does not even leave
one with the impression that he had a clear view of what he was ultimately
trying to achieve. Wittgenstein does not appear to be a reliable guide
as to what he was actually driven by, or striving at; the testimony of
his notebooks might certainly invite a psychoanalytic interpretation. He
did hit the nail on the head when he wrote, around September 1929: "In
mir streubt sich ein Freudscher Widerstand gegen das Finden der Wahrheit."25
The word "sträubt" Wittgenstein himself here spells with an "e" instead
of an "ä". In all other instances I have come across in his manuscripts
he does get the word right. An appropriate Freudian explanation would be:
his resistance is directed, really, against being coerced into standardized
spelling - that is, directed against the norms of literacy, and ultimately
against the recognition that his philosophical problems somehow pertained
to the technique of writing, or to the alternatives to that technique.
If I maintain that, all the same, it was precisely this fundamental issue
which confronted Wittgenstein, my reason for this is the central place
which the notion of meaning as use occupies in his arguments. To
think of meaning as use means to think of language as spoken; written words
are, typically, used to represent spoken words, and in this sense written
words are, typically, names. Under conditions of secondary orality spoken
language once more gains a certain dominance, without however losing its
ties with writing. It is appropriate that in Wittgenstein's arguments references
to both spoken and written signs should figure; a source of confusion,
however, is that Wittgenstein himself is not aware of the radically different
roles played by spoken signs on the one hand, and written signs on the
other; and hence of the radically different implications his arguments
can have, depending upon the examples chosen.

Let me first give two straightforward illustrations.

In a crucially important passage from August 25, 1930, Wittgenstein
writes:

If I were to resolve (in my thoughts) to say "abracadabra"
instead of "red", how would it show itself that "abracadabra" stood in
place of "red"? How is the position of a word determined? Supposing that
I were to replace all the words of my language simultaneously by others,
how could I know which word stood in place of which other word?
Is it here the ideas [Vorstellungen] that remain and hold fixed
the positions of the words? As if there were a sort of hook attached to
each idea, upon which I hang a word, which would indicate the position?
This I can't believe. I cannot make myself think that ideas have a place
in understanding different from that of words.26

One might add that in the last days of July 1930, shortly before this passage
was written, we first begin to encounter those stylistic peculiarities
which are so characteristic of Wittgenstein's later writings: the dialogue
and unanswered question, the familiar "Du" as a form of address.
And the proposition I am putting forward is that while in a language devoid
of the underpinnings of writing it is indeed impossible to perform the
permutation Wittgenstein here claims one cannot perform, to do the same
in writing is, though cumbersome, yet perfectly possible. Here, then, Wittgenstein
must have had spoken language in mind.

On p.488 of TS 211, compiled in 1932, one reads: "Die Worte sind diskontinuierlich;
die Wortsprache eine Abbildung durch diskontinuierliche Zeichen. Das ist
einer der wichtigsten Gesichtspunkte, von der man sie betrachten muss."
Here we might recall that spoken language is not a discontinuous
string of words; rather, it is made up of speech acts inextricably bound
up with the situations in which they play their role. Written language
however is discontinuous; and in the case of written language one
can say that words are pictures, in the sense that written words
do indeed represent spoken words.27 Wittgenstein, here,
was thinking about written language.

There are, of course, a number of crucial passages in Wittgenstein's
later texts where it becomes explicit that the focus is on written, or
indeed printed, language. Thus in Philosophical Investigations 167:
"the mere look of a printed line is itself extremely characteristic - it
presents ... a quite special appearance, the letters all roughly the same
size, akin in shape too, and always recurring; most of the words constantly
repeated and enormously familiar to us, like well-known faces." The tone
here is friendly, reassuring, with no anxieties felt. In the Wörterbuch
für Volksschulen,28 referred to above, those
anxieties are not yet suppressed. This is the remark Wittgenstein makes
in the (originally unpublished) preface to the dictionary: "Again and again
psychological principles (where will the student look for the word, how
does one guard him against confusions in the best possible manner) clash
with grammatical ones (base word, derivative) and with the typographical
utilization of space, with the well-organized appearance of the printed
page, etc."29 Rather than strictly adhering to the principles
of alphabetic order, Wittgenstein envisages various different entry arrangements.
Nor does Wittgenstein invariably adhere to literary German. The
Wörterbuch does not avoid dialect expressions, and includes
some very common words which are typically used in speech, like
"geh!" or "hierher". It even utilizes dialect pronunciation in order
to bring home some grammatical points, like: "ihm, in der Mundart:
'eam', z.B.: 'I hob eam g'sogt' - ihn, in der Mundart: 'n'
oder 'm', z.B.: 'I hob m g'sehn'".30

What does it mean, however: "if we leave the rein to language &
not to life, then there arise the philosophical problems"? My hypothesis
is that, according to Wittgenstein's actual logic, "language" here should
stand for "written language"; and "life" for "spoken language". In order
to prove this, let me compile some more passages from Wittgenstein's Nachlaß.
The first one, providing context for the term "life": "The stream of life,
or the stream of the world, flows on [alles fließt] and our propositions
are so to speak verified only at instants. - Our propositions are only
verified by the present."36 A second one, taking up the
theme "alles fließt": "It's strange that in ordinary life we are
not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us,
the constant flux [Fluß] of appearance, but only when we philosophize.
This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a
misapplication of our language. - The feeling we have is that the present
disappears into the past without our being able to prevent it. And here
we are obviously using the picture of a film strip remorselessly [unaufhörlich]
moving past us..."37 We have arrived at the film metaphor.
So let us continue with the theme "film": "The whole is a talking film,
and the spoken word that goes with the events on the screen is just as
fleeting as those events and not the same as the sound track. The sound
track doesn't accompany the scenes on the screen."38
And, taking up the term "screen", a fourth passage: "what I call a sign
must be what is called a sign in grammar; something on the film, not on
the screen"39.

Comparing these passages, some clear parallels and oppositions meet
the eye. The sign - in "grammar", i.e. in written language - is
on the film strip, i.e. on the sound track. Onto the sound
track signs are written. On the other side of the divide, there is the
spoken word, the screen, and fleeting events, "fließende
Vorgänge". We are now almost in a position to arrive at a conclusion.
Let us, however, look at one more passage dealing with the fleeting,
this time Zettel 135: "Das Gespräch, die Anwendung und Ausdeutung
der Worte fließt dahin, und nur im Fluß hat das Wort seine
Bedeutung."40 Here the cluster is: the spoken word,
application or use, and meaning. The conclusion, then: the
carrier of uncorrupted meaning is spoken language; if we leave the rein
to written language, philosophical problems will arise. A conclusion,
to repeat, Wittgenstein himself has never explicitly drawn.

Let me end by pointing out that although by 1931 practically all the
main discoveries of the later Wittgenstein have made their appearance in
his manuscripts, those discoveries were, well until 1934, again and again
lost sight of by him. Wittgenstein's failure to make the distinctions I
have referred to earlier, distinctions between language spoken and language
written, might serve as an explanation, at least in part, for this frustrating
state of affairs; but also for Wittgenstein's ultimate inability to complete
the "book" he always wanted to complete. Looking at Wittgenstein scholarship
today, it would be difficult to deny that the profession is in a state
of crisis. The point I was trying to make here is that coming to terms
with the orality/literacy issue could be one of the preconditions for that
crisis to be overcome.

NOTES

* Substantially expanded text of a talk given at the
conference Wittgenstein y el Circulo de Viena, organized by the
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha with the collaboration of the Forschungsstelle
und Dokumentationszentrum für Österreichische Philosophie, at
Toledo, November 3-5, 1995. A drastically abridged version of the paper
was presented at the 18th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 13-20 August
1995, Kirchberg am Wechsel.

1. Cf. Walter J. Ong, "The Literate Orality of Popular
Culture", in: Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the
Interaction of Expression and Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1971. Ong's major monograph on the subject is his Orality and Literacy:
The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen, 1982.

25. "There arises in me a Freudian resistance against
the finding of truth", MS 107:100.

26. MS 109, pp.45f.

27. Western philosophy, ever since Plato, ascribes
to spoken language, and to language generally, the attributes of written
language. The definitive formula was provided by Aristotle, in the second
sentence of De interpretatione: "spoken sounds are symbols of affections
in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds".

31. I am quoting MS 213 according to the page numbers
of the copy in the Helsinki Archives. Wittgenstein compiled this manuscript
late in 1931.

32. "Led astray by the substantive, we assume a substance.
Indeed, if we leave the rein to language & not to life, then there
arise the philosophical problems. What is time? - in the question already
there lies the error: as if the question was: what from, from what material,
is time made."

33. "The power language has to make everything look
the same, which is most glaringly evident in the dictionary and
which makes the personification of time possible", Wittgenstein,
Culture and Value, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, p.22e.

34. Let me point out once more that it is the intuitions
of written language which suggest that meaning equals naming; and of course
it is this very equation which is responsible for our bewitchment by language.

35. MS 111, pp.15f. A version of this passage occurs
in Philosophical Grammar (translated by Anthony Kenny, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1974, p.56): "When Augustine talks about the learning of language
he talks about how we attach names to things, or understand the names of
things. Naming here appears as the foundation, the be all and end
all of language. - Augustine does not speak of there being any difference
between parts of speech... Certainly he's thinking first and foremost of
nouns, and of the remaining words as something that will take care
of itself." After undergoing a number of re-editings, the passage will
of course reappear in 1 of Philosophical Investigations.